Posts Tagged
‘cancer treatment’

Learned food aversions also occur in cancer patients receiving chemotherapy. This response is usually established when food ingestion has been temporally paired with chemotherapy application and its associated nausea and vomiting. This problem can occur even after a single course of chemotherapy. Any type of food may be targeted and highly preferred items […]

Conditioned responses to chemotherapy treatment are prevalent in cancer patients and can occur before treatment, generally labeled as “anticipatory nausea and vomiting” (eg, vomiting approaching the hospital), as well as during or after treatment. The prevalence of conditioned nausea and vomiting ranges from 18 to 57 percent in more than 20 studies. The presence and severity of conditioned as well as treatment-induced nausea and vomiting can vary widely among patients, […]

Nausea, Vomiting, and Appetite Disorders Lung cancer patients often experience side effects from treatment, among which nausea and vomiting are the most unpleasant. Kaasa et al reviewed the frequency of nausea and vomiting in clinical trials that used combination chemotherapy for the treatment of inoperable non-small cell lung cancer. Acute nausea and […]

Reuben and Mor investigated dyspnea in 1754 terminally ill cancer patients during their last six weeks of life (National Hospice Study). Seventy percent of these patients had dyspnea, and 28 percent rated their symptom severity as “moderate or worse.” In addition to lung or pleural involvement by the tumor, the presence of underlying lung or cardiac disease and low Karnofsky performance status were significantly associated with dyspnea, whereas age and […]

Chronicity of pain, due to cancer progression or treatment, is frequently associated with psychologic symptoms (eg, sleep disorders, reduction in appetite) and with clinical signs and symptoms that may mimic a depressive disorder. Chronic pain is also a burden to the patient’s family, who may have feelings of helplessness and anxiety.

Bain Pain is an important palliative care problem in lung cancer patients, yet there are only a few descriptive studies that deal with pain in lung cancer specifically. Marino et al examined the subjective and objective characteristics of pain in 164 patients with early lung cancer. Pain was present in 40 percent of their sample, and a relationship was found between the location of the neoplasm, the location of […]

The first systematic assessment of performance status was introduced by Karnofsky and Burchenal in 1949. They developed a single-item scale, rated by physicians, as an additional descriptive measure for chemotherapy treatment trials. The scale has been found to be an important independent predictor of prognosis […]